Benito Orellana twisted his hands together, shifting his weight back and forth, anguish throttling through him. He wasn’t crying, but Evan could see that it was taking most everything he had not to. His stained dishwasher’s apron was slung over a chair back; before Evan’s arrival he had changed into an ironed white T-shirt. No money, but proud.
“A parent, they are only as happy as their least happy child,” Benito said. “Mi mamá used to tell me this. You understand?”
Not at all, Evan thought. He said, “Tell me what happened to Xavier.”
In the square front room of the tiny house in Central L.A., Evan stood across from Benito, facing the picture window. The view looked out onto a massive empty lot razed by bulldozers and the top floors of a tall building being constructed beyond. Workers were visible clinging to the steel skeleton, steering in I-beams as if they were planes on the tarmac.
In Pico-Union any direction you went, you hit a thoroughfare—the 110 Freeway to the east, Normandie Avenue to the west, Olympic Boulevard up top, and the Santa Monica Freeway below.
A lot of getaway routes. Which meant a lot of crime.
Evan had safed the block, the surrounding blocks, and the blocks surrounding those. A three-hour undertaking, wholly necessary before the approach in case Benito was the bait in a trap.
On these initial forays, Evan used to bring a briefcase embedded with all sorts of operational trickery, including signal jamming if digital transmitters happened to be in play. But the briefcase had been unwieldy.
Also, he’d had to detonate it.
Now he used a simple portable RF jammer in his back pocket, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.
Within minutes he believed that Benito was not an undercover agent for Van Sciver and that his plight was real.
Benito swallowed. “When my wife pass, I don’t know how to cook, how to do anything.”
“Mr. Orellana. I’m here about Xavier.”
“She would have known how to talk to him. But I am working so hard. Even right now my friend, he cover for me at the restaurant. I have too much month at the end of the paycheck. I am working three jobs, trying to provide for Xavier. But I lose track of him. There just wasn’t the time to earn and to also … also…”
He was at risk of breaking down.
“Mr. Orellana,” Evan said. “What did Xavier do?”
Benito swayed on his feet, his eyes glazed, far away. “There is a gang where I come from. They kill anyone. Women, children. They are so bad that the government, they make a prison just for them in San Salvador. The police do not even go in. Instead they keep an army outside. The gang, they run this prison on their own. They are…” He searched for the right words. “They are the people you would least want to anger in the entire world.”
“MS-13,” Evan said. “Mara Salvatrucha.”
Benito closed his eyes against the words, as if they held an evil spell.
“It is the most dangerous country in the world,” Benito said. “For a young man, there is nothing but gangs and violence. A hand grenade, it sells for one dollar there. When Xavier was born, we came here for a better life.” Now tears fell, cutting tracks down his textured cheeks. “But it turn out they came, too.”
“And Xavier joined them?”
“He hasn’t been initiated yet,” Benito said. “I know this from my friend. His son, he is one of them. There is still hope.”
“Initiated?”
“Blood in, blood out. You kill to get in. They kill you before they will ever let you leave.” Benito wiped at his cheeks. “I am running out of time.”
“Where is the gang’s headquarters?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do I find Xavier?”
“I don’t know. We fought last week. He run away. I haven’t seen him since. I lost my wife, and now I can’t lose him. I promised her. When she was dying, I promised her I would take care of him. I did my best. I did my best.”
“I don’t understand,” Evan said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Don’t let them make my boy a killer.”
“No one can make someone a killer.” The words were out of Evan’s mouth before he saw the irony in them.
“Yes,” Benito said. “They can. They will.”
The philosophical point was lost on Benito and not worth arguing.
“I promised I would meet with you,” Evan said. “But there’s nothing I can do here.”
“Please,” Benito said. “He is a good boy. Help him.”
“I’m not a social worker.”
“You can convince him.”
“Convincing people isn’t part of my skill set.”
Benito walked over into the kitchen and pulled a photograph off the refrigerator, the magnet skittering across the floor. He returned to Evan, held up the picture in both hands.
Evan looked at it.
It had been taken at a backyard barbecue, Xavier in a wife-beater undershirt and too-big olive-green cargo shorts, a tilted beer raised nearly to his mouth. Raw-boned but handsome, clear brown eyes, carrying a trace of baby fat in his cheeks despite the fact that he was twenty-four. His smile made him look like a kid, and Evan wondered what it felt like for Benito to watch this human he raised transform into a confusion of opposing parts, menacing and sweet, tough and youthful.
Had Jack felt that way about Evan?
He’s the best part of me.
“When he lose his mother,” Benito said, his hands trembling, “he lose his way. Grief makes us do terrible things.”
Evan saw himself in the pest-control shop in Portland, his foot pinning a man’s chest, shotgun raised, the wreckage of a hand painting the floor red.
He gritted his teeth and took the photo.